The BBC revealed that Theresa May, as home secretary in 2015, had planned to use the last immigration bill to introduce a requirement on schools to check children’s immigration status, and to shunt the children of the migrants to the back of the queue for school places. The then education secretary, Nicky Morgan, intervened to block the proposals.

That’s why when we saw that the DfE had announced plans to begin collecting nationality and country-of-birth data from almost 8 million pupils this autumn, we knew that this was not about targeting English language provision to schools that need it, but about undermining migrant children’s universal right to education, as guaranteed by national and international law.

The BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, confirms precisely that suspicion: the DfE and the Home Office compromised in 2015 on immigration enforcement in schools with an agreement that country-of-birth data would be collected.

Home Office requested schools census data on nearly 2,500 children

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Policies designed to create a hostile environment function by denying people access to essential services and forcing them to live under the radar – unable to take exploitative employers to court; excluded from health services; condemned to unsafe and often uninhabitable dwellings; fearful to send their children to school.

But the effects of the government’s obsession with reducing net migration reverberates well beyond the lives of the migrants whom it targets. Not only are Britons without ID hit by these checks, but by requiring doctors, teachers, employers and landlords to check nationality and immigration status, the government forces us to inhabit a society in which our neighbours are suspect, and we are all potential informants.

The Labour MP Angela Rayner has decried the plans leaked to the BBC, arguing that excluding the children of irregular migrants from school is “not a British value”. I appreciate the sentiment, but there is strong evidence to suggest that discrimination, injustice and downright brutality are an integral part of Britain’s moral vocabulary when it comes to immigration control.

Let us not forget that the current prime minister in 2013 chartered a private jet to remove Isa Muazu from the UK. He had fled here to seek sanctuary from Boko Haram. By the time he was removed, was said to be seriously ill after refusing food for about 100 days.

However, I think the point is something more fundamental: are we the kind of society that is prepared to segregate and punish children for whatever papers their parents may have failed to get in order?

The problems Britain faces are not down to irregular migrants, and they are certainly no fault of their children. If there is pressure on school places, that is because for the first time in a decade the government has cut spending per pupil; if there is pressure on the NHS, that is because of a naked refusal to resource it properly; if jobs are few, and pay and tax revenues are falling, that has far more to do with labour market deregulation and global capital than it does with migrants.

Although parents and campaigners have managed to force a U-turn on immigration data collection from two- to five-year-olds, the government currently plans to press ahead with its plans to draw up lists of foreign children who are school age in January, despite the controversy that beset the last school census, and a clear message from teaching unions, Ofsted and politicians across the political spectrum that schools should not be used for policing immigration.

All parents have the right to refuse to give this data and to retract data they have already submitted. It’s a small and easy thing to do, but it sends a clear message to the government that we will not let migrant children bear the brunt of problems that it has helped to create, and which it has an obligation to resolve. Boycott the school census.